I want to make it quite plain that my friend of the pigs’ trotters was not in the least degree under the influence of drink. Throughout my adventures in the underworld, I did not meet a drunken woman. There is a fixed idea also that those poor little prostitutes, with their pitiful earnings of pence and shillings (it is an event if they should get a pound), spend a large proportion of their income in alcoholic refreshment. This is not so. The girls I met at Kennedy Court, like those I met at Camden Town, the Old Kent Road and all over London, are very moderate in their spirituous tastes. There is a freehanded dispensation of chocolate, and they are extravagant in the matter of fruitdrops and lemonade, but they rarely buy drink for themselves, and there is not much cigarette smoking. The causes for this abstinence may be economic, though, personally, I do not believe that shortage of money affects the manner in which that money is spent. If a woman wants drink, be she in the possession of fourpence, four shillings or four pounds, drink she will have. But, as I say, it is not a craving from which these pretty young prostitutes suffer.
The level of discussion in any public lodging house is not high. Small interest is shown in politics, and, save to a few women who have obviously drifted from different social strata, literature is a sealed book. Fashion is a fruitful topic of interest, and the passion for crossword puzzles, or the immediate equivalent, runs very high. Local gossip always holds the attention. So-and-so’s mother’s adventure with the lodger—the prospect of a job for a young sister—plans for the future when your own or a friend’s man comes out of gaol. Over and over again these things are talked over, and, save when an emotional tornado breaks up the calm, the conversation is leisurely, one might say spacious.
Only once did I meet a woman actuated by any interest in ideas. Ideas do not easily flourish on a starvation diet, and all the energies of the outcast are bent towards the problem of board and bed. This particular woman was about five and forty, tall, well built, with a face that had been beautiful and was still arresting. Ida had just shifted a newcomer to bed before she wished to go there—a discipline from which I also suffered, though I managed to evade the clutching hand a little longer.
The complainant testified long, loud and very bitterly.
“She’s always interfering, that old woman! You can’t get a thing in this place unless you pay for it through the nose; she won’t let you have a drop of hot water unless you give her some coppers, and if you don’t tip the old cat she reports you, and you may find yourself chucked out.”
“Its all very well to complain,” said the older woman, “but it’s your own fault, every one of you. You sit there and talk about her when she’s out of the room, and when she comes back you haven’t a word to say. You ought to go in a body and make a complaint to the man who employs her and makes his money letting beds to us. That’s what’s the matter with women the world over; they grumble among themselves, and when it comes to showing fight, they turn tail and run away. It’s always been the same story; it’s like that in life as well as in this place. That’s why men will beat us every time.”
She swept out of the kitchen on the closing words, and someone mentioned that she was not coming back that night. She hadn’t any money.
“Poor Alice! It’s a shame—she’s always so generous with her cash. I’d have lent her a bob myself, only as like as not she’d bite my head off. It’s all very well for her to talk—people are afraid of her tongue; there’s something about Alice that you can’t get over, she’s different to us.”
I never discovered the story of Alice. I do not believe her life holds any dark mystery or hideous secret. I should think she had drifted from the professional classes for purely economic reasons, and that her tragedy, like so many others, is merely lack of means.
Destitution in most cases brings a furtive manner, an air that arouses immediate suspicion. I found myself acquiring that same manner after a very little while, so that when I was faced by an official I answered as though I were afraid (indeed, I sometimes was), and instead of entering a room in my usual fashion, I would slink round the doorway and sit humbly on the edge of a chair. By these, my own experiences, I learned how easy it is to form cruelly wrong conclusions from certain obvious facts. A straight glance of the eye, a clear tone in the voice, an assured and ready bearing; these are but the manifestations of a well-fed life. Take away your regular meals, your comfortable bed, your sense of security, and you will find yourself like any other outcast, slinking along the pavement, shrinking from attention, utterly void of that self-confidence which is the hall mark of success.
I succeeded in evading Ida’s tender care for some time, but at last the hour struck. She beckoned me with her claw-like hand.
“Now, Miss Twenty Eight,” said she, “it’s time you went to bed.”
I followed her along the courtyard, through a sinister-looking door and up a flight of stone steps, on to a landing, from which opened a room which led into two others. My sleeping place was on the first floor. The floors above were planned much in the same way. Three beds stood in a row with one bed across the foot. Mine was next to the wall, farthest from the door. The floor was clean, but that is all that
